I've had this MB for almost 3 months now, and I absolutely love it!
I used it in my first PC since a AthlonXP 2000+ with a normal Gigabyte MB, so I cant exactly compare it with other boards in its class. All I do know is that it has a lot of cool features.

But first, some images:




I mainly bought this board because of its pretty good overclocking and good stability. I have overclocked my E6600 to 390 x 9, but couldnt quite get the 400 x 9 going. I'm an overclocking noob, so many people would get better results.
If your overclock fails, you just power off, power back on. The bios detects a failed overclock and asks if you want to reset to defaults. Easy peazy.

The biggest surprise feature (which I only tried out last night) is the remote you get with the MB. It has the following functions:
Power On/Off (or Hibernate)
Suspend -> wifi is still active when the PC is suspended
Noise off -> This slows all the fans it has control over down to reduce noise. Pretty cool feature.
Launch application
Application full screen
Media functions like volume, next, back, play pause.

When you click the Launch app button, you get a menu to choose the application you want to launch. After you select one, you have the option to start the app and browse for a file, for example a winamp playlist, or a move on your HD.
PowerDVD, iTunes, Winamp, WMP and a couple of others come pre-configured. You also have the option of adding more applications in the custom spots. You can also override the default buttons on the remote with keyboard shortcuts. It has options for alt, ctrl and shift in combination with any key.
With this remote it is entirely possible to plant yourself on the couch and never use the keyboard and mouse to use media apps. From power on to power off.

I havent tried it yet, but the build in Wifi supports SoftAP, which turns your PC into a wireless access point, allowing up to 64 connections. It has a nifty little antenna thingy as well.

Another cool feature is that it has a line in for you to connect your mp3 player or whatever to, and it will play through your PC speakers. Even if your PC is off. I dont know if this works with add-in soundcards, but I doubt it.

The onboard sound is pretty good, although not quite as good as my old Audigy. The colour coded jacks on the back are only suggestions. When you plug something in (and have the sound app open), it asks you what you have just plugged in, and assigns it accordingly. I plugged in the centre/sub channels into the rear channels jack, and everything worked perfectly. If only creative made applications and drivers like this.



The board also comes with 2 gigabit ethernet ports, 8 usb, firewire ( 2 ports I think), 8 channel audio with SPDIF, a bunch of Sata channels and external sata.
It has 2 IDE channels, for a total of 4 drives. Very usefull for people who still have a couple of optical drives and old HD's they want to keep.



The full feature list can be found here.
Asus

The only quirks so far is that you can only use one Ethernet port at a time, except if you bridge them. Even if you have an ad-in network adapter.
This may also be a Windows quirk.

How much did it cost?

It was around R2600.
Yes, thats a lot of money, but at the time there wasn't much of an alternative. Some of the gigabyte boards even required a bios update before they could boot with a Core2 processor.

That MB looks really nice. I may just purchase one of these mid next year, depending on if I purchase the other things I want or not.

It's a very nice board, although i'm thinking of going for the eVGA 680i that's rated the best ATM.

Conroe boards are hectic the 680i is around R2900 maybe more. Then it's RAM and CPU

Comes out costing quite a bundle

This board doesn't officially support SLI, but do Crossfire. So if you want SLI without hacked drivers, you have to take an nVidia chipset board.

There are other chipset boards in the Asus Digital Home series. With the 680i chipset being the king of the hill, it probably wont be too long before Asus releases a 680i DH Deluxe.